The fields of virtual reality and video games summon the emotional issues in their respective goals of presence and flow area. However the question of methodologies for inducing emotions in virtual environments in these mediums has not yet been widely questioned. After defining what emotions are in the philosophical, as in psychologist and physiologist literature, we seek to show existing links between emotion and states of presence in virtual reality and flow zone in video games. We show how the level of knowledge of the mediums may influence susceptibility to induction of emotions in virtual environments. Then we define a way of inducing emotions based on an iterative level management challenge in relation to the skill level.

We validated through two empirical experiments that involved 176 participants a methodology for inducing emotions based on a circumplex pattern. This scheme built around the valence and arousal level of emotion, able to induce emotions in the five essential items component of the design of virtual environments for virtual reality and video games: color, brightness, movement speed, size of the space, and the volume of social interactions.